Sir Paul McCartney was recently named one of the richest people in entertainment, rock’s first billionaire.
Helping him reach this lofty realm was the 7 million in sales of “Beatles 1,” a recycling of the Fab Four’s hits that required no effort by any of its former members.
Being called “sir” or “billionaire” may not be enough for McCartney, though. Perhaps realizing how much is to be made from mere recycling, he has released his own collection of hits from his post-Beatles years even as “1” still rides in the top 40.
With the help of the kind of massive TV commercial campaign that boosted “1,” and a singularly self-possessed two-hour TV special of the kind that greeted the Beatles “Anthology” series, McCartney managed to sell 220,000 copies of “Wingspan” (Capitol, $19.97) the first week. It was enough to open at No. 2 on the charts, behind only Destiny’s Child.
But who exactly is buying this stuff? Youngsters fooled into believing Wings was nothing more than a continuation of those Beatles they recently discovered? Oldsters who craved “Silly Love Songs” on disc? Actual Wings fans who forgot about the previously issued greatest-hits album (“All the Best,” 1987)?
McCartney’s not solely interested in cashing in while the Beatles market is hot.
With the simultaneous release of his first book of poetry, “Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics, 1965-1999” (W.W. Norton & Co., $22.95), not so many months after the release of his first book of paintings, it’s clear that with this flurry of serious artistic endeavor, the poor guy is still trying to win an unwinnable battle of legacies with his sainted former songwriting partner, John Lennon, now 20 years dead.
McCartney’s brief bio in “Blackbird Singing” calls him “one of the most admired contemporary poets and songwriters of the 20th Century.” But it’s a daunting task trying to read his words to, say, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” without following the melody. At the same time, his straight poems (including one about the Lennon murderer, “Jerk of All Jerks”) aren’t much minus a tuneful context. Not a lot of Beatles songs are in the book simply because he shares those songwriting credits with Lennon, of course. But because he is solely responsible for all the solo material and nearly all the Wings songs, it’s interesting to note which of his biggest solo hits are not among the poems.
“Hi, Hi, Hi” for one. “Listen to What the Man Said” for another (“Love is fine, for all we know, for all we know our love will grow, that’s what the man said”).
Man of many melodies
McCartney, it’s clear from these two projects, was a melody man. Emboldened by his work with the Beatles — where he learned he could insert things as incongruous as his “Woke up, fell out of bed” ditty in the middle of Lennon’s dense “A Day in the Life” — McCartney fills his solo material with songs that are similarly patched together, that change direction without notice or that don’t quite hang together.
The “So sad” refrain in “Another Day” is beautifully melancholy but doesn’t necessarily fit with the jaunty pace of the rest of the song. The movie theme “Live and Let Die” begins as a slow ballad, switches to the explosive mock-spy music and suddenly drops in a reggae passage.
Like a lot of rockers, McCartney chose words in his songs simply because they sounded cool and not because they’d make any sense if they were collected in a book when he was 58. (Therefore, no “Jet” lyrics in “Blackbird Singing” either). Sometimes the poetic transcriptions of his lyrics don’t do their songs justice either. In the book, for example, it reads only, “My love does it good.”
But the full chorus to “My Love” would more rightfully be written:
Woe, woe, woe, woe
Woe, woe, woe, woe
My love does it good
To be sure, the cuts on “Wingspan” retain their power. A song that made the skin crawl in 1973, “My Love” can still make it crawl today. But it is worth noting that “My Love” was a solid No. 1 for Wings, and McCartney follows it on “Wingspan,” anticipating possible negative reaction, with his 1976 self-defense “Silly Love Songs.”
Could even the most unschooled 8-year-old in love with “Beatles 1” be fooled into thinking Wings is anywhere as good? Rather, the 2001 new Beatles die-hard is likely to be as let down as Beatles fans were in the ’70s by this subpar stuff.
Maybe all ’70s music sounded this bad. The sugary sax that makes you wince in 1975’s “Listen to What the Man Said” is not so different from the similarly tinny sax in Lennon’s 1974 “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
Still, you can’t help but agree with Lennon’s scathing “How Do You Sleep?” after hearing some of this glop.
Without a strong songwriting partner or anyone to question some of his excesses, McCartney was free to sully his reputation with trifles like “With a Little Luck” and the dismal “No More Lonely Nights” (which appears here twice).
There were some highlights, of course. Among them, the modest early solo and Wings “Wildlife” era, the standout “Band on the Run” album, the odd single like “Junior’s Farm.” The second disc of “Wingspan” makes a case for such little-known things as “Girlfriend” from “London Town” and “Waterfalls” from “McCartney II.” You have to question the whole approach to this material, though. With two discs vs. one for “The Beatles 1,” is McCartney suggesting Wings were twice as good?
`Hits’ and `history’
One disc is listed as “hits” and the other “history.” But what is his standard? As much as he talks about the concept of a band in the “Wingspan” TV special (directed by his son-in-law and with interviews by his daughter, Mary), we never see another member of the band.
And the guidelines for what’s included are all over the place, with half the “history” disc dedicated to the pleasant selections from his one-man “McCartney” and “McCartney II” albums and the “Ram” album credited to Paul & Linda McCartney.
He throws in more solo material from “Tug of War,” “Pipes of Peace” and “Give My Regards to Broad Street,” with “Pipes of Peace” even making it to the “hits” disc, though it never charted. And though there were 25 Wings singles in the top 40, only a dozen make it on the “hits” disc. Among the missing, the dopey “Mary Had a Little Lamb” but also the strong “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.”
The biggest omissions from the era he covers are the early ’80s duets with other artists. “Ebony and Ivory,” with Stevie Wonder, was No. 1 for seven weeks; taken together, his singles with Michael Jackson, “The Girl Is Mine” and “Say Say Say,” were No. 1 even longer, for nine weeks.
Still battling the legacy of his former band all these years later, McCartney apparently doesn’t want to acknowledge his hits with Jackson, who owns most of the Beatles catalog.
